Magalí Sare: "There I discovered the inner workings of the patriarchy"

BarcelonaUnmarried (Microscope, 2025) is the singer's most ambitious and stimulating project. Magali Sare (Cerdanyola del Vallès, 1991). For three years, she has researched folk songbooks from around the world that address the often traumatic, often liberating, relationship between women and marriage. To bring this project to fruition, she has involved ninety musicians, including regular collaborators such as Manel Fortià and Sebastià Gris, and the voices of the Cor Bruckner Barcelona choir. The result is a multilingual album that musically represents, to this day, the culmination of Magalí Sare's career, as she navigates with knowledge and boldness a wide range of aesthetics, from folk to jazz, from opera and chamber music to pop. The official launch, featuring a heart on stage, will take place on March 26 at La Paloma in Barcelona, ​​as part of the Empremtes Festival. Before that, she, Salvador Sobral, and the Cor Geriona choir will headline one of the musical performances at the Gaudí Awards gala, which will be held this Sunday, February 8, at the Gran Teatre del Liceu.

When you realize you'd need a heart to make it come true Unmarried?

— I sang in the cor cor for many years of my life, and it was one of the most rewarding musical experiences. My sister, Julia Sesé Lara, is the director of the Bruckner Choir in Barcelona, ​​and she's been receiving many commissions. More and more modern artists have been incorporating cor cor into their music. And I thought, "Girl, wake up, they're getting ahead of you!" But I wanted to do it right, with very well-crafted, very virtuosic arrangements. It's very powerful, and a privilege, to be accompanied by the cor cor in which I sang for so many years.

Did the idea of ​​doing things from the heart come before the project about badly married women?

— It was the heart first, yes. In fact, on the previous album, Sponge [2022], I already wanted to record with my heart, but due to lack of time I couldn't.

I saw the show Unmarried when you previewed it at the Mediterranean Fair in Manresa in OctoberAnd the heart was already there. Is that live model sustainable, with so many people involved?

— Look, I'm blown away, because I'm getting so many gigs with real heart. Luckily, I've received a grant from... Programa.cat. This means that Catalan taxes subsidize a very large part of my fee, and it has encouraged many programmers to do it.

In Manresa you explained that the conceptual origin of the album is the discovery of a Slovakian song, Oddavac se budu.

— For many years now, I've been lucky enough to travel a lot making music, especially with the project with Manel Fortià, and I always like to prepare a little song from each place I'll be playing. And the more specific, the better, because it's happened to me before that I've sung a song from Brno in Prague and then they tell me, "Very nice gesture, but it's not the same." I try to be precise, and I try to choose a children's song or lullaby with repetitive lyrics, because it's not like I'm going to learn a whole song by heart. ParsifalIn Slovakia, I was shown several songs, and suddenly one stood out more than the rest. It was sung by women and told the story of a bride saying goodbye to her family and her homeland. I deduced it was her last night as a single woman, and it hit me hard; I hadn't expected it, and it made me very sad.

And you knocked down the thread.

— Yes, I thought I'd look everywhere for wedding songs. There are some in both Catalan and Spanish songbooks, although they're more stories of women who don't want to get married, who run away, are punished, locked in a tower, or are simply unfaithful to their husbands, than farewell songs. All this information about traditional music has resonated with me because it's been a three-year research project. Not because I wasn't convinced, but because I was passionate about it. It's true that there's a lot of my own music on the album, but the lyrics are very much inspired by tradition.

You do it live The chanterelle, which is one of the most emblematic songs about unhappily married women.

— Yes, but I want to maintain that essence a bit and perform a different song, a different discovery, at each concert. Perhaps The chanterelle I'll keep it, I don't know.

The chanterelle It's one of those songs that, despite being very popular, perhaps people don't know enough about what they're talking about.

— That's also what I'm aiming for, because it's a very well-known song and many people don't know what the second and third verses are about. And that's precisely why it has such an impact, because you think: I've heard it a thousand times and I didn't know it was about a broken woman.

You make the album's conceptual framework very clear from the beginning, with Advertisement in the newspaperIn it, a woman looks for a husband who doesn't drink and doesn't hit her. But you don't just focus on the most tragic aspects; you also include songs that celebrate the decision not to marry.

— Absolutely. It's just that word, unmarriedI saw that it was used both for married women who wanted to get divorced and for women who remained unmarried. And the reasons why a woman doesn't marry can be numerous and very contradictory: it can be due to absolute marginalization and poverty; some daughters were kept out of marriage so they would stay home caring for their parents, and, conversely, there were women who had their own businesses, who were economically independent, for whom a husband was of no use. The term "unmarried woman" encompasses this entire spectrum of meaning. I also greatly appreciate the alternative models that subtly appear in popular lyrics. In fact, in the Occitan song about the unhappily married woman, I see a woman who is letting off steam: I imagine her doing housework but thinking that she will get rid of her husband; just like that, as if it were nothing. Or a Portuguese song, in which I see the older women of the village telling the younger ones: "Oh, don't get married yet, you have to enjoy life."

AND Serviñaco?

— Serviñaco It's the Quechua name for a tradition of the Inca people, which is also very special, because the couple had to live and work together, they could have children, and if it worked out and both families agreed that they should marry, they would marry; if not, they could separate. And the more men a woman had been with, the more valued she was, because she had more experience and knew better what she wanted.

There are also warning songs among women.

— This is it Red CrabThat Portuguese song I was telling you about. I'm sure there was a lot of protest and sexism in those songs. And I always wonder, "Who wrote that song, a man or a woman?" Because it makes a huge difference. For example, you don't find anything gay or lesbian in traditional music. Nothing at all. But a song can have a double meaning depending on who sings it. I love this; I'm passionate about symbols, rituals, and ceremonies.

In November, in Cassà de la Selva Cantuto Festival, at a dinner party for singers, a woman sang You're not getting married, girls, a song from oral tradition that fits very well with Unmarried"Don't get married, girls, they're all drunks and they'll give you a walking stick."

— Wow! Pass me this song, I'll sing it at a gig. It's packed. On this album, where I sing in so many languages, I convey that this has always happened, and that, unfortunately, it still happens in most countries of the world: arranged, forced, or even child marriages. It's so hard to make progress on this, it's unbelievable.

You say you love ceremonies, and you prove it by reviving the Greek epithalamia that were sung at weddings.

— When I discovered them, I was so blown away that I said, "I have to write one." And I wrote one...

Did you have an epithalamium in your head? Sappho's, perhaps?

— I read Sappho's poems, but the epithalamium that truly shaped the aesthetic is Catullus's. Greek weddings, and later Roman ones, were major village celebrations. The young people, boys and girls, sing, improvise, and engage in a battle of the sexes. I discovered the very heart of patriarchy, because the women are terrified that the first star of the night announces that one of them will be abducted that night by Hymen, the god of ceremonies and weddings. And they're terrified! In contrast, the boys are radiant, passionate, and incredibly empowered, and you think, wow, this has deep roots.

The album reflects the different musical traditions you've been exploring for some time. However, what caught my attention was the more prominent presence of a lyrical, almost operatic voice. Perhaps it's because of the themes? I was thinking of so many operatic protagonists with marital problems, like Turandot, Madama Butterfly...

— It's full of clichés. It's a very strong one, the woman abandoned by her husband who is nothing without him. And you say, "Come on, girl, get up and leave." I studied opera for a couple of years, and singing in choirs where you perform classical and contemporary music also develops a classical timbre. With Quartet Mèlt, I was searching for that classical sound, but at the same time, I was studying jazz, and it was completely incompatible because they're two very different muscular techniques, and it was a nightmare. When I decided to leave classical music to focus on jazz, I wasn't quite a jazz singer because I had something more lyrical about me. I feel very fortunate to have studied and experienced these styles, but when it came to making the album, I said, "I'll do whatever I want." I love the classical repertoire, German lieder, and opera, but I approach it from a different perspective, asserting that I also come from there.

How do you decide on the musical treatment for each song? Based on the lyrics?

— I set myself some guidelines. I was very clear about the heart and the bowed strings. And, above all, what marks Unmarried The thing is, the producer figure wasn't there. I really wanted to see 100% what was in my head. Therefore, my heart, the strings, and everything I could record at home were the three pillars. From there, a fourth pillar emerged: the collaborations with Pau Figueres, Llorenç Barceló, Luca Argel, The King's Singers, the Terrassa 48 Chamber Orchestra...

This makes it so The bad marinade have a more folk feel with the banjo, and make the Slovakian song version much more jazzy, Mädchenlied Take a flamenco color...

— One starting point is: if I have to do a German lied, I won't do it with piano and voice, but with guitar, so that Pau Figueres can shine, who ends up transforming it into a bulería. In the case of the Slovakian piece, Manel Fortià told me that the melody resembled that of Lonely woman [by Ornette Coleman]And I could be there with Manel Groovjant playing underneath. The album has been quite a puzzle of many creative forces.

Heart, bowed string, lyrics that are women's stories... Lucky I saw you performing Unmarried in Manresa in October, a month before the album was released Lux by Rosalía...

— There is a resemblance, yes. In fact, when Rosalía released her first single [Berghain], several people who knew what I was planning wrote to me. And I thought: it's getting closer to classical music, checkThere is heart, checkThere is an orchestra, checkShe sings in I don't know how many languages, checkThree years preparing the album? Me too. But, well, I love it... I think it's very difficult to believe I've copied anything, because it's temporarily impossible.

In fact, you have a track record that supports the naturalness of the step you have taken. Unmarried.

— I think so. Her step was very brave, but it's like a much bigger leap into the void, whereas I've been doing this for a while now. We're both quite restless, and sometimes we look for cracks where no one expects them to be. Or we look for things we haven't done before and go to similar places to talk.

Among the literary references for your album is Rosalía de Castro in RosalíaJosefa Contijoch in Look at the mouth, a poem by Qian Qi in Two pearls...

— There are two lyrics that are entirely mine, Epitalami, the first one I've written in Portuguese, and No, no, noThe rest are popular lyrics. And The secret marriage It was a German song [An den kleinen Radioapparat], with music by Hanns Eisler and lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, about a refugee from World War II, but Sting changed the lyrics completely and wrote a beautiful poem about a secret marriageI identify with what Sting did, because I like to remix songs.

No, no, no It's the one that sounds most like an aria, especially in the second part, right?

— I don't know. Some people have told me it's like a musical, though far from the norm. At first, it sounds like a lullaby, but it turns out it's about a mother desperate to get her child to sleep. What's more, she's in limbo, because she has a child she didn't want. She's a single mother. What does the future hold for this woman?

"I'm neither a nun nor a saint, I'm just a divorced woman," she says.

— Yes. There were also many women who felt they had to say, "Look, I want to be independent, I want to study, I don't like men, I'm going to become a nun." But she doesn't want that either. She has a child and doesn't know where she's going to live. It's heartbreaking.

You've done a very ambitious job. Is there an audience to live up to the expectations of such ambition?

— We'll have to see about that on tour. You've said it very subtly. My family is much more direct and tells me, "Nobody will hear this."

That wasn't the point, it was the scale of the project.

— I think the album really resonates, and I'm very good at promoting it. Maybe it won't get massive radio airplay. I don't create flashy content on social media, nor do I have ten high-production music videos. But I have so much faith... If people take the time to listen to the album, relax on the sofa, I'm convinced they'll have a wonderful experience. And if you come to one of my concerts, I'm sure you'll forget who you are, because I put so much effort into making them profound experiences. I'm convinced that if you take any young person who only knows the music on the radio to one of my concerts, it will change their perspective on everything, and they'll see that there's so much more music out there, beyond what's on the radio and the annual concert that the current star puts on at the Palau Sant Jordi, where tickets cost 80 euros. There's so much more. This is also my fight.

Apparently, the natural habitat of the album would be a theater or an auditorium, but it has enough dynamics to also go to concert halls.

— In fact, we even have some open-air concerts booked for the summer, but with a strong emphasis on the scenery and a peaceful atmosphere. The programmers are trying to ensure that Unmarried I appreciate having a space for it. All it takes is focused, open minds, and it can be done anywhere.